Recent trends in the telecommunications industry towards unified communications emphasize the need for converged networks to deliver acceptable quality of service (QoS) for different types of applications with varying QoS needs. Multimedia applications such as Internet telephony are among the end-to-end applications which demand strict QoS guarantees from the underlying data network. Understanding the network behavior at all stages of the deployment of such applications is critical for their performance. For example, at the pre-deployment stage, it is necessary to assess whether the network can deliver the required QoS and more importantly which parts of the network fail to do so. After deployment, monitoring the performance of the network is necessary for maintaining acceptable QoS levels.
Conventional network monitoring and analysis systems are generally not configured to provide an adequate mechanism for understanding link-level QoS behavior in a network. Such information is particularly useful for the purpose of locating the sources of performance problems in a network, but is also useful for many other purposes.
Accordingly, a need exists for an improved network monitoring and analysis system which provides information useful for locating the sources of performance problems at a link level, as well as for other purposes.